Comment by 47282847
6 hours ago
To me he sounds inexperienced/naive and a little scared (and thus “defensive”) but well-intentioned. His response makes me believe that he didn’t do it for fame, to deceive, or other selfish reasons.
6 hours ago
To me he sounds inexperienced/naive and a little scared (and thus “defensive”) but well-intentioned. His response makes me believe that he didn’t do it for fame, to deceive, or other selfish reasons.
He was told by the original author to not use the name for his project 5 days ago. 3 days ago he wrote "Guys, all I wanted to do is to make Notepad++ available on mac and keep it open and free. I'm talking to Don. I really hope he will be ok with the name. It actually expands notepad++ brand to mac."
Already ignoring the authors wishes. He said clearly it is not OK and wants the name changed. That's it - but he keeps ignoring it.
I fail to see good intentions here.
Yeah. And if you want to expand an existing brand that's not yours, you ask first, and only continue after a green light from the owner.
Well, that part might be temporarily excused by naivety. But he did ask, was not replied to - and he did it anyway. So I actually do not believe in naivety. And now it is past that point anyway.
Judging by the fork author's name, should've asked them in russian :-/
First step would be taking down the website, second step is an apology, third step is bringing back online with new branding and eventually a final word to thank them, share the link and say they remain open to criticism.
It's not rocket science. Pretty sure even his LLM would give that strategy and implement it without burning too many tokens.
More than inexperienced, either he really can't read a room or he knows very well what he is doing.
Right? Instead we get:
- Saying he's hoping Don allows it
- "I actually did nothing wrong"
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 2
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 3
- Why are you so mad? Give me a week
- Why are you so mad? I added more lies to the website
- Why are you so mad? I'm working on it
... over the course of 2 days. Shutting down the website and pulling the app offline should have taken minutes.
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I don't believe that he is naive. It looks like he wants to use the Notepad++ brand authority to capture the notepad++ macos market (which is big!) Thus he is infringing on a trademark for his own benefit.
> capture the notepad++ macos market
Is it big?
Notepad++ is big in the Windows world but I am not certain that it is automatically big on Mac. They have much more Mac-native feeling editors like TextMate, Nova, Cot, even SublimeText feels more macOS-ishy than Notepad++
I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice.
If you're in the Windows world that might seem like an improbability given how big it is there, but trust me, it's not a well known name anywhere else.
"I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice."
Strong disagree. The thing I miss in linux most is notepad++ or something as capable and usable (open for suggestions, but chances are I already tried them)
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It’s probably a few thousand users. When I switched to mac, I looked for notepad++ and settled on BBEdit (which is awesome and funny I forgot about it all these years).
This doesn’t seem like for money, but for esteem.
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A malicious actor would be happy to be publicly labeled inexperienced/naive.
The inverse Hanlon's razor cuts much better than the original one these days:
Never attribute to stupidity (incompetence|naivety) that which is adequately explained by malice.
You don't need an inverse Hanlon's razor, that's the natural response and a recipe for a social dumpster fire.
That reasoning holds but it is not based on any of the facts at hand. There's a reason why any community worth being apart of has a tendency to assume good faith. People make mistakes. I respect Don Ho's response and I don't see how the pitchfork brigade is bringing anything valuable to the situation.
People are pissed because instead of taking the feedback, apologizing and acting immediately, he wrote comment after comment giving excuses. What he did is literally illegal, and ignorance or good intentions is not a solid excuse.
If you’d actually installed it and realized afterward that you’d been misled, whether by someone who doesn’t understand trademarks or someone acting in bad faith, you’d probably feel differently. Leaving a comment on HN in that situation is a pretty reasonable reaction.
This. A billion times this. The community should be shouting from the rooftops that there is an intruder in the neighborhood.
Maybe there's no malice intended and this is just a colossal pile of honest mistakes. Maybe this author is as clueless as he appears. Maybe, but until he appears at the United Nations and doxes himself before embarking on a world wide apology tour, nobody in their right mind should install that binary. I wouldn't even run the build script in a sandbox.
Naive my ass.
From the fork's authors page
> Andrey Letov is a New York product leader and software engineer.
And then a long list of professional achievements follows.
He knows exactly what he's doing
I don't wanna be rude but it looks like this guy just arrived on the Internet this year - around March-April and it doesn't seem like he has any prior activity. He just decided to roll this Notepad++ for macOS and that's it
Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
It reads to me like English isn't his first language. Either way the complexities of open source licensing are something a lot of people don't understand.
As stated multiple times in the linked discussion: the licensing of the open source code is not the issue. It's the use of the trademark, and making their fork look like an officially endorsed one.
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Ironic this comment reads like you didn’t even grok the basics of the issue if you think open source licensing is the source of confusion.
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> Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
What do you mean by this? Aren’t most avatar images generated three days?
Does he remind you of anyone?
https://www.wired.com/story/jia-tan-xz-backdoor/
His linkedin (on which he posted about notepad++) is pretty light publicly but it does have a post about him speaking at a conference in NY on product management and people actually commenting that they saw his talk. That was a year ago, so definitely possible that there's some "setup an account to look real" BS going on but at first glance my take is that he's a real person.
The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.
Here's my guess: Eastern European origin, currently working and likely living in NY, PM gets ahold of Claude and decides to vibe code himself a port of Notepad++. Maybe he really has good intentions, maybe he is looking to make donation money, maybe a bit of both, whatever. Probably looking for donation money. Regardless, he thinks "Oh people fork/port open source projects all the time, I'll just do that" and has no conception whatsoever that he is going to piss people off OR that he's violating the law. English is not his first language either I'd bet, and he's using Claude to write a lot of / all of his comments. Acts frankly ignorant and confused and dumb in response, doesn't know what to do, etc. AI can't help him because he's not even givin the AI context well. A shitstorm ensues.
FWIW, I did a quick/not that advanced static analysis of the code compared to the published binaries and couldn't find anything malicious. I'd leave that to the experts though for any real opinion.
TLDR;; My guess: Dumb PM gone mad with power and looking for a donation-based cash grab, possibly with the good intention of keeping the project going long term, does not know the first thing about IP and does not speak english as his first language. But an actual dude.
We'll see how it shakes out.
The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy that (and on a quick incomplete read, the author is betting on getting exactly that sort of pass)? It's one thing to plumb the depths of interpretations of the GPL or do a detailed compare and contrast of one license versus another (agreed: nontrivial), but "hey yo! Ima gonna use the name and branding of someone elses very, very popular project and try and make some cash from it that'd be cool right?". No...sorry...I cannot suspend my disbelief to that extent.
Product manager in software for 10 years. I cannot believe the inexperienced defense.
To me it seems like a "idgaf" mentality, and trying to get as much and push as far as he can. Never in his replies he shows any sign of admitting that he should not have put the notepad++ name like this, that it looked like an actual endorsement and this was wrong. He just finally (after putting repeated pressure) accepts to change the branding. I don't understand why some people like him do that and how.
I assume it is the "fake it till you make it" mentality, like "fake the endorsement until they actually endorse your project". Clearly doesn't work like this, but if this mentality has gotten you far, why not try it here too?
You can be inexperienced and naive, and at the same time understand when you make a mistake. Being "inexperienced" because you actively refuse to learn from what people tell you that you do wrong is not inexperience anymore.
What LLMs have brought to our industry is exposure of how many people in it are total pieces of shit. You have the hucksters who are out there trying to get you to invest in their LLM startup and they constantly use language that is functionally lying about what their product is by likening what it does to actual functioning human brains and personalities. You have the fantasists who see a grammatically correct sentence as proof of omnipotence and then run around telling everyone how AI has totally changed everything. You have the posers who use LLMs to cut-n-paste code from other's repos, directly and indirectly, and then claim they wrote it and pretend to have skills and abilities they don't have. Then you have the ignoramuses in media and such who know nothing, they hear all the hucksters and fantasists jibber-jabbing and proceed to flood the world with untrue stories about AI and it's affects on society.
> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.
No inexperience here. It is malice
thats a lot of companies for a guy so young. Probably gets the boot a bunch.
the road to hell is paved with good intentions
> His response makes me believe …
I’d pay more attention to his behavior.
The smarmy dishonesty about "expanding the Notepad++ brand" actually is selfish and ill-intentioned. Perhaps he is too young and naive to fully understand that he is being parasitic. But naivety is a well-travelled path towards malice.
Regardless, he absolutely deserves to be shamed on GitHub for this. I don't like the online culture of public shame and sandbagging - I think this GitHub thread should be closed now that it's viral - but sometimes people actually do things they should be ashamed of. This needs to be a tough lesson.
I'm spamming this everywhere - taken from his blog:
> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.
Also' he's not young. Check his github avatar
You know, what's frustrating is that when I first contemptuously dismissed "Notepad++ for MacOS" as a trademark violation I did skim that stuff and accordingly just sort of assumed the port was technically legitimate, but disrespectful of copyright. But of course it was vibe-coded, and apparently chock full of stupid bugs that would have been caught with adequate manual testing. Why wouldn't I assume otherwise?
This from his website is pretty funny:
The first well-known software he vibe-coded is a buggy port of something a talented human spent many decades hand-crafting. The slop project is completely devoid of creativity or imagination, and it's going down in public flames because he was stupid about copyright. Kind of cartoonish, actually.
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It sounds like BS. Guy’s done it all if you believe his resume.